Americans of the Baby Boom generation derived, from mid-century experience, a view of the U.S. Supreme Court as essentially pro-liberty. Boomers spent their formative years watching the Warren Court steadily expand the rights and freedoms of American citizens. They then internalized the view that our country’s highest court exists as a guarantor of American democracy. Exercising the hegemony that they enjoy over so much of our culture, Boomers passed this vision of the court’s role down to the subsequent generations.

It is time for all of us to abrogate the Sixties-based view holding that the Supreme Court typically functions as a guardian of liberty in the United States. Because with the fascist Donald Trump’s three appointees having reshaped the court, our country’s loftiest judicial body is now dismantling American liberty across the board. From LGBTQ rights to democracy and farther afield, the majority justices have trained their sights on the fruits of the mid-century Western rights revolutions. And few safety valves exist to contain the damage they may do.

Two cases, one of them from our state, exemplify the Trumpified Court’s designs on American democracy. The court heard arguments in a case involving LGBTQ equality in which a homophobic graphic designer contended that she should be able to deny service to same-sex couples. Trump’s justices, along with the partisan and always nasty Samuel Alito, were high sympathetic to her asserted right to discriminate against gays. If the court rules for this homophobic Coloradan, gay people across the country could be subjected to pervasive discriminatory treatment, and a hard-won right will have been partially revoked.

The court, then, has made plain its openness to reversing advances in social equality. But their reactionary agenda extends to liberal principles with deeper roots than the long-overdue protection of LGBTQ people from discrimination in public accommodations. In Moore v. Harper, they could allow red states to all but abolish democracy within state lines. Moore is NC House Speaker Tim Moore, veteran democracy-gutter. He and the other Republican plaintiffs want the Supreme Court to curtail any right whatsoever of state courts, and even of governors with veto power, to balance out legislative authority over the setting of federal election policy. If accepted by the justices, this “independent state legislatures theory” could green light unlimited undermining of democratic integrity wherever autocratic politicians control state governments–which applies to nearly every red state, and to many which are purple.

This Supreme Court was shaped by the insidious hand of Donald J. Trump. It would prefer to distort the Constitution for anti-democratic ends rather than seek the full “termination” of the document called for by their fascistic patron. But the end result would be similar: an America far less democratic, and far less just, than what history seemed to augur in the halcyon days when so many people from their view of the United States Supreme Court.

Alexander H. Jones

Alexander Jones is an original contributor to PoliticsNC.